The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Art Object

Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop

Can you spot which photos are fake? Can you imagine why they were altered? Put your eyes to the test. Download Faking It for the iPad, available in the App Store.

Digital cameras and image-editing software have made photo manipulation easier than ever, but photographers have been doctoring images since the medium was invented. The false "realities" in altered photographs can be either surprising and eye-catching or truly deceptive and misleading.

Faking It is a quiz that asks players to spot which photos are fake and figure out why they were altered. Through fifteen sets of questions accompanied by more than two dozen remarkable images, the Faking It app challenges misconceptions about the history of photo manipulation.

Images in the app range from a heroic portrait of Ulysses S. Grant to a playful portrait of Salvador Dalí, and from New York's glamorous Empire State Building to Oregon's sublime Cape Horn.

The app complements the exhibition Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop (on view October 11, 2012–January 27, 2013).

Music: "Staccato" by Alastair Cameron, CC BY 3.0
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Alastair_Cameron